Opening Day: Reflections of a Deer Hunter and His Relationship with God

It was, by all accounts, a perfect morning. As the first shards of sunlight began to slice their way over the horizon and through the spaces between the trees, they brought with them an electric tingle that rolled up my spine like the tiny feet of a millipede. There wasn't a hint of wind. There wasn't the slightest sound. It was 28 degrees and I was 20 feet from the ground, sitting in my deer stand in an old oak tree like some sort of camouflaged growth. It was the first day of rifle season and the conditions for seeing deer were ideal. All I had to do was be quiet, be still, and of course, be lucky.

As the rays of sunlight began to warm my gloved fingertips and my exposed face, I relaxed and settled in for a long morning in my favorite place to be in late November; the woods. I started to drift off in some suspended state, half-way between asleep and awake, when I heard an abrupt crunch in the recently fallen leaves behind me. A shot of adrenaline immediately rushed through me and every muscle in my body tensed all at once. Almost as soon as it hit me it subsided and I couldn't help but let out a slightly audible chuckle at myself. Squirrel. That first squirrel to wake up and begin to bounce around the leaf-blanketed ground in the woods on opening day always does that to me.

As if somebody flipped a switch, the woods suddenly came alive. There were six gray squirrels playing catch-me-if-you-can off to my left. I could hear a flock of turkeys winging their way off their roosts in the pine trees about 100 yards in front of me, and a chickadee landed on a branch in front of me doing that head-cocking "what the heck are you?" dance. It was a great day to be alive. My wife, like most hunting widows, can't understand why I'm so obsessed with getting up hours before dawn in the freezing weather to tack myself up on a tree and sit for hours and hours. If I could only translate this feeling right here and right now to her she couldn't help but "get it."